opinion

This is a guest post by fellow blogger, Aayush. You can find him at his blog by following this link. Here’s a little bit about him:

I’m Aayush, 16 years old and still stuck in school. I love to write about stuff cause it’s a really cool way of expressing your opinions. It’s practically the only way you can talk about something without being interrupted or having to repeat yourself. I can never restrict myself to writing about just one thing, because there’s so much going on and so many interesting things. And anyway, who would like to read about only one topic all the time? That’d be so boring and monotonous. (I just used a big word to sound cool. Don’t act like you don’t do it too.)

I generally write about juicy, controversial topics, from LGBT rights to drugs to taxes and so on. I also write posts about diet and gyming. Regardless of what you enjoy, you should check out my blog, because
A) It has interesting things you might find out you enjoy and
B) I really want more views and likes.

As someone who does not believe in heaven or hell, or rewards on the basis of life lived, I often wonder what the purpose of life is. It does seem rather arrogant to assume that our ephemeral lives would have a sense of purpose behind them, yet nonetheless I persist in my questioning. As has often been said, the problem with finding the purpose in life presupposes that purpose has to be found. Maybe, purpose has to be created. Maybe everyone has to create his or her own purpose.

In finding a purpose, the first thought I wrestled with was that after a certain period of time, I will not exist and life is extremely temporary. However, the problem with this thought is that it claims I will not exist. I may not continue to exist, but surely, I would have existed. And this drew me towards an interesting idea.

Although our lives will end, we are immortalized. We exist in this time, in this moment, and nothing can stop that. Let me articulate it in a more concise manner.

I think that the past, present, and future occur simultaneously. After all, what is present for us now will become past a minute later. We exist, permanently, in every single second that we have occupied. Some time in the past, you were still learning how to walk. If the past and the present do occur simultaneously, a past version of you is still leaning how to walk. And so your past shall exist forever. Those times will exist forever.

In the future, you have already died. You have ceased to exist. But how is that relevant? The terrifying thought is not of us dying, but of us ceasing to exist. And if every single one of our seconds lived are untouched, unscathed from the death that will inevitably approach, what is it there to be afraid of?

The trick is to live in the minutes, because that is where life lies. You seize the moment to the best and enjoy it, because these times are your forever, and you are, in the truest sense of the word, eternal.

While these thoughts help me realize the continuity and relevance of life, they are from a purpose. I will not be so audacious as to proclaim a constant, inflexible purpose for every creature to exist. I can only narrate what my purpose is, and hope it enables you to find your own.

Most people believe in some sort of omnipotent deity who watches over everything and rewards the good guys and punishes the bad guys. I personally find the notion absurd. An omnipotent being creating a universe billions of years old for the sake of a planet in which us humans could occupy a minuscule portion of history? I find the idea of everything being created especially for us too be too far-fetched, especially when you take a look at the stars and the sky and accept you own insignificance with regards to everything outside the planet. The entire cosmos remains unaffected by our existence, yet it was designed especially for us? Kinda like using a 2 TB hard drive for storing a three page document.

When we die, our brain activity continues for about seven minutes. In those seven minutes, everything plays through our mind in a dream like sequence, as a result of the brain secreting chemicals and whatnot. In these seven minutes of our final dream, we watch our life flash before our eyes. And my purpose is to make those seven minutes worth watching, by creating as many memories as possible.

You will reside forever in the memories you create. There are billions of you existing simultaneously in different points of time. Keep as many versions of yourself happy as you possibly can. Live in the moment, because that is where you are fated to live.

I was watching a video where the host was asked whether he thought voting should be mandatory.

He was split on the issue, and argued a bit from both perspectives. On one hand he thought that since we have mandatory jury duty, it makes sense that we could have mandatory voting. He also argued it might be better for the country, since in polling, America (and you could likely argue the same in many Western countries) the country leans Left, which means the Liberal party would be far more likely to win.

On the other hand, he didn’t much like the idea that people would be forced to vote.

I’m pretty firmly in the camp against mandatory voting. In fact, I think mandatory jury duty is awful as well, and it isn’t a good excuse to force people to do more.

Anyhow, I made a video about it that goes a little bit more in depth. It also includes the original hosts points.

I had made a goal of 100 for the year of 2017 and have already reached it.

So I’m pretty excited about that.

Thank you to anyone who subbed through this blog. I’m hoping to do a 100 subscriber video in the near future. Maybe a Q&A or something, so if you have any ideas or any questions you’d like me to answer, please leave them in the comment section.

In this video I respond to a believer who says he knows the real reason why atheists don’t believe in his god. I hope you enjoy it.

During my childhood, my parents were very involved with the church. I went to church every Sunday and helped clean the church during the week. I went to Sunday school, and this is where the trouble began as far as my faith is concerned.

My father loved to read and he often bought National Geographic magazines and I would read them after he was finished. These magazines clashed with a lot of what my Sunday school teachers were feeding me.

I remember them telling me that believing in Jesus was the most important factor when it came to being saved. The problem for me was geography and time periods – how could the Native Americans know of Jesus, for example, when Europeans hadn’t yet discovered North America? How could isolated tribes, which I’d read about in…

I ran across a video asking what has YouTube atheism ever achieved. I thought the person asking the question was doing so in a genuine manner so I decided to make a video response. It’s only four and a bit minutes long. I’ll insert it at the bottom of this post.

Marvin also made me some more avatar poses and he says he’s sending me some more. I’m looking forward to seeing the surprised pose.

So here they are.

Let me know what you think about the avatar poses and video. Do you think online atheism in general has achieved anything or do you think it’s a waste of time?

So I was going to write a longer response to Mak’s post, which offers some food for thought about Tribalism and identity politics.

I arrived home from work, and decided to sit down and watch a few videos before I would type up some sort of reply.

Coincidence led me to a video that offered a better response than I could give here in writing.

Please watch it to the end when you’re done reading this.

But just before that I want to address one small point that Mak made to my statement. I said:

The reason why I’ve written so much about ideologies lately on this blog is because of identity politics and how dangerous I believe it to be. I think this is another direct result of that.

Mak’s response was:

And I disagree with his analysis. it is not identity politics that is the culprit, no, it is years of oppression based on perceived or real differences that finds expression in such acts of violence.

The person tortured in that video I was commenting on had nothing to do with that past oppression and neither do most of the people alive today. That is no excuse for mistreating people and it never will be.

(I’m not saying that Mak was saying it was by the way)

When people enslaved, segregated and tortured black people (for example) because of the color of their skin, they were doing so for power and they did so by using identity politics. It is the outcome of identity politics taken to its sickening conclusion.

Grouping people into categories and assigning attributes to them based on arbitrary traits is exactly how practices like slavery begin. Those people believed that all black people were inferior animals who deserved to be enslaved. They assigned attributes to them (brutish, less intelligent etc) based on the arbitrary trait of having a darker skin color than themselves.

It didn’t lead to humane treatment then and it doesn’t now. People are individuals and should be judged on what they do; on their personalities; by the merits of their actions. Not on things such as gender, skin color etc.

A ‘history of oppression’ doesn’t excuse wrongdoing. It doesn’t excuse violence, torture or racism in return.

As Martin Luther King once said:

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

At one point, the victim was threatened with a knife and told to curse President-elect Donald Trump.

“Say f— Donald Trump,” someone is heard saying.

“F— Donald Trump,” the victim says.

And:

The suspects, three of whom are Chicago residents, are expected to be charged in the next 24 hours, Cmdr. Duffin said. Police will determine whether kidnapping or hate crime charges will be given to the suspects, who he described as “young adults.” They have all given video statements.

When I first heard this story on social media last night, I tried finding it on major news networks because I thought it might be a hoax. There have been several fake hate crimes reported since the election of Donald Trump, but this one seems to be the real thing.

Last night I was able to find a story on CBS but other mainstream news channels have begun to report on it this morning.

I think it should definitely be classified as a hate crime. It was racially and politically motivated and they have video evidence of the attackers yelling racial and political slurs.

The reason why I’ve written so much about ideologies lately on this blog is because of identity politics and how dangerous I believe it to be. I think this is another direct result of that.

We put people into racial and gender categories instead of treating them like individuals and then we teach some of those categories that other groups are oppressing them. We even teach people that some groups are incapable of being racist, when that (power + prejudice = racism) clearly isn’t true.

I think these types of events will continue to escalate as long as we go down the insidious path of identity politics.